"It involves superheroes, it involves a very high-concept plot, it's a story such as you never have seen before, and it spans the centuries," Lee said in a telephone interview from New York Comic Con, where he and MTV are set to announce the new series on Saturday.

While most of the rest of the nation's elite campaigners have reliably gotten down into the intellectual gutter this campaign season, you really have to give credit to Christine O'Donnell in Delaware for transforming that Senate race into a high-concept campaign for the nature and meaning of the self.

Person of Interest, tasked to occupy CSI's critical former Thursday time slot, feels refreshingly non-formula, a high-concept action series from J.J. Abrams' cult factory with traces of Minority Report: the goal each week is to avert a crime before it happens, based on projections from an inexplicable computer program.